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Case study · E-commerce · Technical SEO & recovery
Caffeine Brothers: recovering a hacked coffee store and rebuilding it for search and AI answers
A Philippine coffee roaster’s online store had been hacked, buried under duplicate content and split into thin product pages. Here is the starting point, every fix we made, and the first measured signals.
ClientCaffeine Brothers (caffeinebrothers.co), a Philippine coffee roaster selling retail and wholesale coffee beans online
ServicesSEO audit, security clean-up, technical SEO, content consolidation, product page SEO, AI search visibility
Period coveredSeptember 26 to October 3, 2026 (work is ongoing)
StatusIn progress. Results updates at the 3-month and 6-month marks.
Disclosure: Caffeine Brothers is co-owned by Bright Harbour Media’s founder, Robin Salvador. We are publishing it because we can show every number from the site’s own accounts, and because the same process is what we run for clients. Every figure below comes from Google Search Console, Ahrefs or the WordPress admin, with the date it was taken.
At a glance
The clean-up in five numbers
112
duplicate blog posts merged into stronger pages with 301 redirects, and 47 kept posts rewritten or expanded
396→283
URLs in the XML sitemap after removing thin, duplicate and demo pages
20→5
near-identical size-based product pages consolidated into complete product pages
1 + 1 + 5
backdoor administrator account, rogue Search Console owner and hack files removed
44→51
AI assistant citations in five days (Ahrefs, Sep 27 to Oct 2, 2026)
The starting point
Four problems holding the site back
We audited the site on September 26, 2026, using Google Search Console, a crawl of every sitemap URL, and the WordPress admin.
01
The site had been hacked
On July 4, 2026, Google ranked the homepage for a foreign gambling brand — 97,257 clicks and 583,374 impressions of spam traffic in a single day. The attacker left a hidden administrator account with no email and a fake registration date, added themselves as a Search Console owner and planted PHP files in the site root. There were also 1,796 spam customer accounts and 5,362 pending spam comments.
02
Too much duplicate content
The blog had 328 published posts, and about 120 repeated another post’s topic — some up to seven times. Search Console listed 209 URLs as “Discovered – currently not indexed”. The site still carried 13 theme demo posts and hundreds of stock photos and filler paragraphs.
03
Thin product pages
Each coffee was sold as four separate products, one per bag size, with almost the same text on each. Google had refused to index 8 of them.
04
Weak authority
Search Console showed 38 linking websites, several of them spam. Commercial searches such as “coffee beans supplier philippines” sat between positions 18 and 26.
| Baseline metric (Sep 26, 2026) | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks, last 28 days (gambling traffic excluded) | 111 | Search Console |
| Impressions, last 28 days | 9,860 | Search Console |
| Click-through rate | 1.1% | Search Console |
| Average position | 21.7 | Search Console |
| AI assistant citations | 44 | Ahrefs |
| Google AI Overview citations | 0 | Ahrefs |
What we did
Five workstreams, security first
Fixes were sequenced so that nothing new was built on a compromised site.
Security first
- Removed the backdoor administrator and the attacker’s Search Console access; one administrator and one Search Console owner remain.
- Scanned 26,784 files. The 5 hack files were deleted and now return 404; a host malware scan came back clean.
- Two-factor login for staff accounts only, so customers never see an extra step, plus a CAPTCHA on login and registration.
- Deleted 1,796 spam accounts that had never ordered (every real customer kept) and 5,362 spam comments.
- Disavowed 419 spam and gambling link domains, confirmed in Search Console.
Content consolidation
- Grouped the duplicate posts into 53 topics and kept the strongest URL for each; 112 posts now 301-redirect to their kept post.
- Moved the best unique material into the kept posts and improved 47 of them with new sections, tables and FAQs. Health claims were checked against Mayo Clinic, EFSA and published reviews.
- Removed the 13 demo posts, 510 hotlinked stock images and about 100 machine-written filler paragraphs.
- Repaired 287 broken internal links and pointed 102 old links straight at the kept posts.
Technical fixes
- Exactly one H1 on every indexable page, confirmed by a crawl of all sitemap URLs.
- Fixed broken and duplicate schema: blog posts carry clean BlogPosting markup and product pages carry FAQ markup.
- Noindexed archive and off-topic pages, and cleaned up robots.txt.
- Wrote meta descriptions for every page that had none or had placeholder text.
Product pages built to sell and rank
- Merged 20 size-based products into 5 variable products, one per coffee; the old URLs 301 to the new ones.
- Each product page now has a short direct answer, a spec table, a price-per-size table, a brew guide and an FAQ with schema.
- Added Espresso Beans and Ground Coffee collections, plus a prepaid coffee subscription, to match what buyers search for.
- Added 50 contextual internal links from 40 blog posts to the money pages, and merged a drip bag page that competed with its own shop category.
AI search visibility
- Published a curated
llms.txtwith a business summary and the 38 most useful pages. - Added answer-first “quick answer” boxes and dated tables to guides and category pages, so they are easy for AI assistants to quote.
- Made sure no AI crawler is blocked, and tied every article to one business entity in the schema.
Early results
First signals, one week in
Search engines need weeks to re-crawl a site after changes this large, so these are early signals, not final results.
| Metric | Starting point | Latest | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI assistant citations (all platforms) | 44 (Sep 27) | 51 (Oct 2) | Ahrefs |
| ChatGPT citations | 10 (Sep 27) | 13 (Oct 2) | Ahrefs |
| Pages cited by AI assistants | 19 (Sep 27) | 20 (Oct 2) | Ahrefs |
| Clicks, last 28 days | 111 (Sep 26) | 167 (Oct 3) | Search Console |
| Impressions, last 28 days | 9,860 (Sep 26) | 11,700 (Oct 3) | Search Console |
| Average position, last 28 days | 21.7 (Sep 26) | 14 (Oct 3) | Search Console |
| URLs in the XML sitemap | 396 | 283 | Site crawl |
| Registered user accounts | 1,850 (mostly spam) | 54 (admin + real customers) | WordPress |
Honest context: the two Search Console windows overlap by about three weeks, and most of the work went live only in the final week, so we do not credit the click and position changes to this project yet. The AI citation counts are from two snapshots five days apart. Google AI Overviews still cite the site zero times, and that is a main target for the next phase.
What’s next
The next phase
We will publish measured updates at 3 months (January 2027) and 6 months (April 2027).
- Weekly tracking of 25 commercial keywords in Search Console, such as “kapeng barako”, “espresso beans” and “coffee beans supplier philippines”.
- Earning links from Philippine directories, food media and café partners, and building presence in the communities that AI Overviews cite.
- Moving the site closer to its customers with a CDN, to improve mobile speed.
- A results update at 3 months (January 2027) and 6 months (April 2027).
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